There is a demand for frozen confectionery products with interesting and distinctive shapes. Products that are shaped in two dimensions have been known for many years. They are usually produced by an “extrude and cut” process, in which partially frozen ice cream is extruded though a nozzle and cut by a wire into portions of uniform thickness. A stick may then be inserted and the ice cream can then be, for example, coated with chocolate and wrapped in individual packaging. The two dimensional shape arises from the shape of the nozzle, but there is no possibility of shaping in the third dimension using this process.
Three-dimensional shaped products can be produced by moulding. However, moulding processes have drawbacks, in particular the tendency of the ice cream to stick to the mould.
WO 04/17748 discloses an alternative process for the manufacturing of shaped ice cream products, the process comprising;    providing a pair of parallel cylindrical rollers, each having a multiplicity of open cavities on its surface,    filling two cavities, one on each roller, with ice cream,    allowing the ice cream to expand outside its cavity, and    counter-rotating the rollers so that the two cavities are moved opposite one another and the ice cream in each cavity is pressed against the ice cream in the other cavity.
This process presents many advantages. In particular, it allows the formation of complex shapes (true 3-dimensional products) at a high production rate. However, in order to minimise product defects and ensure that the two halves of the product stick together without a peripheral gap around the join, the radius of curvature of the rollers needs to be quite large relative to the size of the product. Large rollers are expensive to produce, take up lots of space in a factory and are heavy, so that it is inconvenient to change them (e.g. when changing product shapes). Thus there still remains a need for an improved method for producing shaped frozen confectionery products.